Soon after I contacted them Simon replied back and agreed with my interview request. Below you’ll find Simon’s replies to my questions. Feel free to add your own comments or questions.

1. Where do you guys come from? We’re from Dublin, Ireland. We have wind and rain but great Guinness. It’s a trade-off.

2. What did you do before developing themes for WordPress and WooCommerce? We worked for a web agency building sites for clients. WordPress was a massive part of our workflow back then also and it was a platform we really enjoyed. Theme-building was the next logical step for us when we left.

3. Which is your most popular WooCommerce theme? We launched a WooCommerce theme called Adrenalin on ThemeForest in late 2014 which sold really well. It recently hit 2,000 sales which is a great milestone.

4. Do you follow WordPress security guidelines when developing themes for WordPress and WooCommerce? Yes, of course. We’re required by ThemeForest and .org standards that we pass every major check. It’s essential in all of our themes. Not only that, we’ve published an extensive blog post on implementing sniffers within your coding workflow which helps help debug a lot of issues before they become a problem.

5. Did you ever have to deal with a security issue with your company websites? Anybody who has ever run a WordPress site has probably had some security issue. We’ve helped clients who have experienced such a problem.

6. How do you compare Woo with Shopify? Do you feel that the latter is actively gaining ground in the e-commerce cms market share? We love Shopify also. They do many things really well and this competition is great for eCommerce businesses. It makes WooCommerce up its game which is good for everyone. It’s a great choice for starting off and getting an online store up and running quickly without worrying about technical requirements. This is where I see the growth primarily coming from. At scale though, I feel WooCommerce is a better choice.

7. Let’s say you have the chance to be heard from WooCommerce(the company), what would be your advice regarding the future WooCommerce marketing or development roadmap? For marketing – I’d say they could be promoting their ecosystem better. This includes great developers of plugins and themes. Development-wise – dependency management. Give developers a better way to avoid conflicts between extensions. That would solve a great number of pain points for users.

8. WooCommerce is a good choice for people who are looking to own their site content and data but this means they must be on top of any tech related issue and also deal with hosting problems. Do you think that there is ground for a one-stop service which will provide themes, plugins, maintenance and managed hosting under one roof? Absolutely! I’d add advice to that list also, as many shop owners don’t know what plugins can achieve their goals. The whole WooCommerce ecosystem is so vast it can be confusing to store owners, who at the end of the day should be focusing on their products and customer support rather than being a computer science major.

9. Mention one thing you want your service to improve in the near future. We’ve lots of great plans for our WooCommerce theme, Shoptimizer – https://commercegurus.com/shoptimizer/ – we’re excited about its potential to help store owners.

10. Where do you see this industry and your company in 2 years? eCommerce will continue to grow – its potential is staggering – which allows our business to grow. We see great opportunities in helping regular folk get started and make additional income doing something they love.

11. Do you have any question for us? If you could recommend just one thing for store owners to do regarding their site’s security what would that be?Answer: We strongly suggest all business site owners creating an IT disaster plan in case they get hacked in order to keep their business continuity, minimize recovery time and follow GDPR guidelines.